Operation Sword
by mikethemadness
Summary: The aftermath of a battle in the 41st millenium.


p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"span style="font-family: 'Arno Pro', 'Times New Roman', serif;"It was the blinking lights of distant explosions that awoke Dunheil. The horizon flickered with the white glaring blooms of artillery impacts, the ground flinching and the rubble jumping after each impact./span/p  
p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"span style="font-family: 'Arno Pro', 'Times New Roman', serif;"The flashes irritated Dunails eyes as he blinked them open, squinting at the bright throbbing lights. The world shuddered as he heard the thumps of detonation, rippling the earth beneath his fingers, accompanied by the creak and skitter of crumbling brickwork./span/p  
p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"span style="font-family: 'Arno Pro', 'Times New Roman', serif;"Harsh light threatened to blind him as he fully opened his eyes and slowly turned his head away from the conflagration. He checked around himself, wincing at the pain in his neck and shoulders as the glanced around his surroundings. /span/p  
p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"span style="font-family: 'Arno Pro', 'Times New Roman', serif;"Little had changed since he was last conscious./span/p  
p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"span style="font-family: 'Arno Pro', 'Times New Roman', serif;"Corpses surrounded him, heaped or in dismembered pieces, blackened and awash with blood and gore. The stench of shit, innards and fyceline was cloying. Most of the corpses were not human./span/p  
p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"span style="font-family: 'Arno Pro', 'Times New Roman', serif;"Gradually, painfully, Dunhail sat up, grimacing and spitting blood as he pushed himself up on one hand, propped on the bodies beneath him. He held the other hand in front of his face and frowned in mild surprise; it was still there./span/p  
p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"span style="font-family: 'Arno Pro', 'Times New Roman', serif;"The last thing he remembered was using it to thrust a grenade down the gullet of an ork Warboss./span/p  
p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"span style="font-family: 'Arno Pro', 'Times New Roman', serif;"The flesh was burnt black and peeling, and blood seeped from several lacerations he assumed were from the orks huge tusks, but the limb was still attached, even if it didn't seem to be working so well at the moment. The fingers weren't responding and it ached like a kick in the balls./span/p  
p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"span style="font-family: 'Arno Pro', 'Times New Roman', serif;"The rest of him wasn't in much better condition. Most of the carapace armour and uniform on his right arm had been blasted apart and shredded. The rest of his armour and equipment was in tatters, his hellgun was nowhere to be found, and his visor had been shattered by an impact that had left a decent dent in his helmet. He was covered in blood./span/p  
p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"span style="font-family: 'Arno Pro', 'Times New Roman', serif;"Fortunately his rebreather was still intact. If not for that he would have been poisoned by the toxic atmosphere while unconscious. /span/p  
p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"span style="font-family: 'Arno Pro', 'Times New Roman', serif;"With a burst of determination he climbed to his feet, stumbling on loose body parts, and took a proper look around him./span/p  
p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"span style="font-family: 'Arno Pro', 'Times New Roman', serif;"Roughly a hundred ork bodies filled the rubble around him. The building he was in had once had a roof and walls, but the concentrated battle had taken care of that. The area was open to the sky for fifty metres in every direction, but there was little light aside from the fading blooms that had woken Dunheil./span/p  
p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"span style="font-family: 'Arno Pro', 'Times New Roman', serif;"Amongst the orks lay his men, three dozen Imperial Guard Stormtroopers, what had been left of the company after 13 weeks of unrelenting assaults against the orks in this damned city./span/p  
p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"span style="font-family: 'Arno Pro', 'Times New Roman', serif;"A few metres in front of him lay the ruptured, headless corpse of the warboss. The thick plates of banded steel had protected it from the imperial hellguns and bayonets. Only Dunhail had survived the close range, hand to hand combat, braving the massive power claws and tusks to feed the monster a short fuse grenade./span/p  
p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"span style="font-family: 'Arno Pro', 'Times New Roman', serif;"By that time all his men had been dead./span/p  
p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"span style="font-family: 'Arno Pro', 'Times New Roman', serif;"He gathered up a hellgun from the floor and slotted in the charge plug from has backpack. Not much ammunition left. /span/p  
p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"span style="font-family: 'Arno Pro', 'Times New Roman', serif;"Taking a deep breath of filtered air, Dunhail took stock of the situation and started rooting around amongst the sprawl of corpses, finding his combat knife still in his webbing and thoroughly stabbing each ork body before he checked it. The orks had a habit of not being as dead as they looked./span/p  
p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"span style="font-family: 'Arno Pro', 'Times New Roman', serif;"After a while he found what he was looking for. His vox-operator had been beheaded and lay in a pile of ork fallen, but his caster was intact. Dunhail took the piece of equipment from his comrades dead shoulders and went to find a suitable ork to sit on./span/p  
p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"span style="font-family: 'Arno Pro', 'Times New Roman', serif;"His whole body burnt with agony. He could feel ribs grinding, joints cracking. His men were dead. On top of that, it looked like it was going to rain. The black clouds looked pregnant with toxic moisture./span/p  
p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"span style="font-family: 'Arno Pro', 'Times New Roman', serif;"The success of his mission felt hollow./span/p  
p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"span style="font-family: 'Arno Pro', 'Times New Roman', serif;"He thumbed the vox-caster to the regional command channel./span/p  
p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;""span style="font-family: 'Arno Pro', 'Times New Roman', serif;"Spear to Command. Come in Command. Over." He was answered by static as he spoke into the vox-horn. "Spear to Command, do you copy?"/span/p  
p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"span style="font-family: 'Arno Pro', 'Times New Roman', serif;"There was a fuzzy burst of noise from the receiver, mixed in with hashed words and harsh whining, that made Dunhail flinch away./span/p  
p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"span style="font-family: 'Arno Pro', 'Times New Roman', serif;"He looked over the Vox Caster again to make sure and tried again, even if he couldn't hear then there was a chance they could hear him./span/p  
p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;""span style="font-family: 'Arno Pro', 'Times New Roman', serif;"Spear to Command, Operation Sword is a success, repeat, Operation Sword is a success. The Warboss is dead, Gorkax is dead."/span/p  
p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"span style="font-family: 'Arno Pro', 'Times New Roman', serif;"Fuzzy moaning ebbed through the headset./span/p  
p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"span style="font-family: 'Arno Pro', 'Times New Roman', serif;"He set the vox-caster aside and leant back on his hand, letting a yawn arch his back and draw a strange sucking wail from the tubes of his rebreather. He pulled a ration bar from one of the pouches on his belt and stared at it dejectedly, knowing he'd have to find a place with clean air before he could actually eat /span/p  
p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"span style="font-family: 'Arno Pro', 'Times New Roman', serif;"The work of a Scion was never done, it seemed./span/p 


End file.
